Fragile earth

Quotes

The non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy. That State is the best governed which is governed the least.

Mohandas Ghandi

In no longer pretty citiesThere are warrants, forms and chittiesThere are fingers in the kittiesAnd a jackboot on the stair.

V for Vendetta

Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Thomas Jefferson

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

John Stuart Mills

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

Never give your government any power that you wouldn't also be comfortable entrusting to a genocidal dictator.

The Angry Exile

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C.S. Lewis

America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.

Claire Wolfe

The powers delegated to the government must be precisely defined … and clearly be of such extent as that, by no reasonable construction, they can be made to invade the rights and prerogatives intended to be left in the people.

Richard Henry Lee

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

James Madison

A charity that relies in the main part on taxes is no more a charity than a prostitute is your girlfriend.

Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.

John Adams

Government’s view of the economy can be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidise it.

Ronald Reagan

It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness ... There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [...] We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Angry Places

Thursday, 10 February 2011

If I smoke in a pub, the landlord runs the risk of prosecution. Is this fair? Is it right that a completely “innocent” person should suffer for the actions of another?

I have been trying to come up with another law that follows this same pattern. The nearest I can come up with is the seatbelt law, where a driver is responsible for his passengers. However, in that case a car is an extremely small space and the driver is well aware as to who has a belt on, and who hasn’t. A publican can be working in the bar, while I am smoking in the lounge and the only way he becomes aware of my protest is by entering the room.

Is the smoking ban unique in this respect? Is it the only law where a person can be convicted without even being aware that a “crime” has been committed?

It didn't occur to me at the time but I know of one very similar law, and have even blogged on it a couple of times (see here and here). The first of those relates to the story of a doctor in Perth whose Lamborghini was confiscated for 28 days after his mechanic was accused - not convicted, notice, just accused - of reckless driving by doing 160 km/h in a 90 zone. Last November I saw something that made me intend to revisit this but unfortunately I forgot. The interesting news then was that the driver, Leone Magistro, was found not guilty. So to recap, the owner, Dr Nugawela, lost his car to a police impound yard for four weeks not just for something he wasn't aware of, present for or able to control, but in fact for something which could not be proven to have happened at all. How did they get it so wrong?

Dr Nugawela told The Sunday Times the officers who stopped the car had told him they had estimated the speed and did not have a printout from a radar device.

An estimate? They took someone's car over an estimate of its speed? Boggle.

The second time I blogged this subject goes back to last year's Melbourne Grand Prix and will probably be familiar to both my readers in Britain (hi Mum) since it concerned Lewis Hamilton acting like a bit of a cock by burning some rubber on a public road. In that case they just confiscated 'his' car for a couple of days but as I said at the time,

... of course it's really not his car at all. What would a Briton living in Switzerland being doing owning and running a car in Melbourne? The car was of course a loaner, apparently courtesy of a local dealership. So what these tough 'anti-hoon- laws have achieved here is fuck all apart from confiscating the private property of a wholly innocent third party. Lewis Hamilton is a very wealthy man and will not suffer from even the most OTT fine any court here will be able to impose, and since he won't have a Victorian licence points are a non-issue as well. It will be an embarrassing incident for him but that's at least as much thanks to the media as the police, the courts or these ridiculous laws. The only person who's really being punished is the owner of the car, which being a company is probably not suffering too much but nonetheless has had it's property confiscated despite having done absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Somewhat prophetically I also asked:*

What if it's not a rich man's toy like a Lamborghini but a tradesman's work vehicle, and he can't work until he gets it back? What if it's not a dealership loaner but 'Mum's taxi' needed for all sorts of errands that would then have to wait for at least two days?

Prophetic because I've just come across yet another instance of this happening, and this time it was indeed someone in his mum's car getting it confiscated for 28 days.

Western Australians have a broader idea of 'Mum's Taxi' than you find in Britain

Now there's not much disputing that the driver is not a saint.

It is understood the driver, from Darling Downs in Perth's south-east, was behind the wheel and was carrying a friend as a passenger, despite his licence being suspended two days earlier.

But we can see that's a two seat ute. If his friend was the passenger then clearly his mother couldn't have been in the car, had no way to see that he was driving so fast, and had no way of telling him to slow down. Unless she had actually given him permission to use the car in the knowledge that he'd been suspended, which is possible but seems out of the range of normal behaviour when you live in a state that takes your car away at the drop of a hat, what possible justification is there for punishing the mother? Especially as the WA government said they'd change that law after the Dr Nugawela / Leone Magistro case so that they no longer punished innocent owners.

Er, so what the fuck happened to the amendment then? And yet again, even if it's admitted that someone guilty of no crime has been punished through this stupid and iniquitous law it's all too late. The guy was pinged by a camera on New Year's Eve and according to this the car was seized on the 8th of Jan and he appeared in court on the 3rd of this month. The case was adjourned until March 4th since his lawyer was on holiday and he felt he needed the legal advice.** And how does this help his temporarily carless mum? Not a fucking bit - she'll have been allowed to take it back again by now, but no matter what happens it can't be un-confiscated. She was, just as the pub landlords being discussed over at Smoking Out The Truth are, being held responsible for the actions of another person. Both might be expected to wield some influence over the offending parties but they can't be expected to maintain a presence at all times, or indeed to physically prevent the law being broken if they do happen to be present - normally considered to be the job of the police in any case. Yet the law makes no allowance for this and will punish them all the same, perhaps even to a larger degree than the person actually committing the offence. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, which is pretty unfair given how huge, complex and incomprehensible the law in most places is these days. And now ignorance of an offence even occurring is held to be no excuse either.

That's just something, alright. But it's not justice.

* I was doubly prophetic that day since I also suggested that eventually someone would fight the driving offence and be found not guilty, but that it would be no benefit to the owner who would already have been deprived of his car for however long before going to pick it up. I had no idea at the time that in one of the two cases that prompted the blog this would indeed be what happened, even though Leone Magistro always denied speeding.
** Oh? Ya think?